Slashdot Mirror
Review: Harry Potter
I'm a latecomer to the Harry Potter phenomenon. A few friends recommended the books to me, but it wasn't until the local town of Zeeland, Michigan decided to push to have the book banned from school libraries and local book stores that I decided I had to read it. I read the first book and was just amazed. Here was a story that was fun, easy to read, had involving characters and a simply wonderful imagination. Quite simply, "The Hype" was warranted. In this era of the Internet, and playstations and old fashioned TV, this was just the book to get kids reading again. Hell, this was just the book to get me reading again. My schedule doesn't give me much free time to enjoy a book, but I made time, and read the first 3 Harry Potter books on my next 3 flights (I'm saving the 4th book for next time I fly ;) I don't read much. But I'm glad I read these books. They were great.
Of course by this time, the movie was already under construction so I kept a stray eyeball on it to see what would come of it. I wept when I heard Chris Columbus was directing (Home Alone? Mrs. Doubtfire? Stab me please). Why not Terry Gilliam? I thought he would have been perfect, except that I have no clue if the man could direct swarms of kids. Columbus could. And I'm glad to say that he did.
I won't belabor the plot. You know already unless you live in a coffin that Harry Potter is the witch hero brought from the world of Muggles to his true destiny at Hogwarts, a traditional English boarding school ... for witches. He meets up with a variety of friends including the giant Hagrid, the little-miss-perfect Hermione, the Headmaster Dumbledore, his best friend Ron. He also meets some bad guys, Professor Snape (played by Alan Rickman, who I always dig), Draco Malfoy. If you've read the book, you know the characters. If you haven't, you either don't care, or haven't been paying attention to every AOL Time Warner media outlet which has been relentless hyping the film for weeks.
The story is simply epic. Orphan Boy learns of true powers. Boy goes to train to master his powers. Boy fights monsters, comes face to face with true evil, and defeats it. Think Star Wars, but with broom sports instead of x-wing battles.
The kids are dead on. Harry, Ron, and Hermione are almost exactly what I'd expect. They are convincing actors and do an excellent job. And they actually act. Not like Phantom Menace where Jake Lloyd brings every scene featuring his dialog to a crashing halt with his wooden delivery, or The 6th Sense's Haley Joel Osment who just has to make that look at the camera half the time and this is somehow interpreted as being a great child actor. The grownups are good too. Robbie Coltrane's Hagrid is really excellent. Likewise the Dursley's are spot on. I would have liked to get a bit more of the teachers. Especially Dumbledore and Snape, but this is the story of the kids, not the grown-ups.
Since this is a special FX blockbuster kind of movie, I'll go into it a bit. The look of the whole movie is dazzling. The casting is right on the money. The architecture is skewed and bent, just like it should be. Hogwarts itself is dark, but the grounds are beautiful and colorful. Everybody visualizes books differently, but I gotta say they did a fine job creating a convincing world for our magical trio to get into mischief.
Many of the effects are subtle and seemlessly integrated. Keep an eye on the paintings and watch them move in the background. Where the effects really collapse is the people during action sequences. The troll battle. Kids falling off brooms. They cut back and forth between real kids and CGI kids. And the CG kids just don't cut it. They just look wooden and their skin has no flesh texture to it. Most of the shots are short, but at least for me they really pulled me out of the fun. Especially during the Quiditch match. I wanted to cheer and be excited, and certainly the seen as a whole was brilliant. But every couple shots it would be so obvious that the child on the broom was animated that I kept having the illusion spoiled. I kept thinking I was watching a Playstation 2 cut sequence instead of a feature film.
What got sacrificed from the book to make this a 2:30 movie? Well not much. The biggest thing is the details in classes. The books love to have little anecdotal stories in classes that often tie together at the end. A spell. Some child doing something that seems irrelevant, but later matters. But the kids are almost never shown in class. But thats ok. Things also seemed a little more slapsticky, but I guess Mr Home Alone couldn't pass up on that. And I'll forgive him. This is a kids movie. A few sub plots are axed. Many plots are narrowed down (notably the dragon sub plot which is reduced to one short scene)
In short, this the best for-all-ages movie I've seen since perhaps Toy Story 2. And I'll be there opening night for The Chamber of Secrets too.
It was an ok movie, IMHO.
But god damn, I'm getting sick of all the merchandising crap. A friend and I were walking down a store and we saw a "Harry Potter Magic Wand". You want to know what it was? A fake plastic treestick. It was curved and bent to represent something you'd pull off a treebranch, except it was plastic. God, thats thick.
Does anybody know why they changed the name (of both the book and movie) for the U.S.? Did they dub the movie as well to change the name of the stone?
I'm just curious because I can't imagine why they would go to so much trouble to eliminate the word "philosopher".
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
This movie is likely going to be the first successfully designed DVD movie. The theatrical release, by nature, is assured success from the start which allows for ample planning to release a vastly expanded version on DVD.
Not just deleted scenes, but fully composed add-ons that needed to be deleted to bring the film within a reasonable length for theater goers.
I hope to see this used more. Many adaptations fail due to the 2-2.5 hour length the average movie goers will endure at a cinema. DVD and what ever replaces it allow directoers to utilize their immediate resources to film full adaptations/stories that can have all the backstory added later to fully realize their vision of the story.
I admit, I have no concrete knowledge on HP, but given the trim and the quality that Columbas (surprisingly) pulled off here, I'm confident the DVD will be excellent.
I substituted in a 7th grade classroom yesterday. I thought it would be interesting to ask them about Harry Potter.
The results surprised me. Only 4 or 5 of 27 were planning to see the movie this weekend, and only 3 or 4 more expressed any interest in ever seeing it.
I'm guessing its been over-hyped, so that cool twelve-year-olds are no longer interested.
I went to a screening last night, and although my friends who hadn't read the book came out with completely enthusiastic reviews, I was somewhat disappointed.
The writers did an incredible job sticking to the true story - but maybe they did too much. The characters were fantastic (especially the kids), but I knew exactly what each child was going to do from minute one. The problem is that I never got completely engaged - there wasn't any mystery or spontaneity to the story. Now some people would support a movie true to its book, but I need some other compelling reasons to see a movie.
The CGI was pretty awful for the entirety of the movie. But watching the character portrayals made this movie worth my money. Everyone from Harry's awful aunt and uncle, to the other kids at Hogwarts, to the teachers was done magnificently. And a couple of those really surprising, frightful moments were nice (but I think younger kids would be quite scared).
My final suggestion: If you haven't read the books or seen the movie, put your money into reading the books! They are truly fabulous, and your imagination will create a more engaging and wondrous story than any director can portray. Now if that doesn't convince you, fine, go see the movie, you'll like it, you'll laugh, it's a fine time.
And if you have read the books, I don't know. You can pay to see the movie, but don't expect incredible things. I found myself thinking about other things during the movie (like how hot my feet were) because I was expecting everything. It's still fun, and good acting is always a nice change.
Final unrelated note: The new Star Wars trailer was AWFUL. Scooby Doo trailer was hilarious.
I thought the point of the review was not to hype the movie, but to present an assessment of the substance. I'm as suspect of "hype" as the next guy, but an absolute negative prejudice is just as foolish as an absolute prejudicial adoration. And it seems that Taco was saying he liked the books and movies despite the hype, not because of it.
While -most- mass-marketed entertainment of the Harry Potter sort ends up being sterilized, condescending, manipulative, and uninteresting, not all of it is. Sometimes you find entertainment that has value beyond the hype.
Personally, I think the movie came close. It was entertaining, and fairly rich for something made by Chris Columbus. It wasn't a great movie, or a classic, but worth my lousy $6. Like a lot of the other people who have posted here, I didn't know much about the Potter phenomenon except that the books were selling very well. Just before a recent cross-country drive, I had a pair of well-read, intelligent friends suggest that I read one. They said it wasn't great literature, but still entertaining stuff, even for adults. So I threw one of the books on the reading pile. Sure enough, it was imaginative and fairly entertaining. Maybe if I had been more in tune with pop culture and known about the phenomenon I'd have avoided it. But what the hell, it was a fun, quick little read.
The movie was a faithful, meticulous adaptation, and I think the reviews I've read got it basically right - a pretty good film, overall, with a lot of imagination and not overboard on the cynical, empty manipulation you'd expect from that director. But because it's such an exact replica of the book, it's lacking it's own artistic heart. Kind of like a photocopy rather than a piece of art.
I dunno, maybe I'm as brainwashed as everyone else, but it seems like plenty of thinking, critical adults are able to enjoy the stories despite the hype, not because of it. It is true, though, that the stories are kind of Frankenstein's monsters cobbled together from most every hero fable and archetype that you've all read before. Not to mention Raold Dahl....
Fluffy (the giant three-headed dog) was quite fuzzy, typical of bad special effects. The background and arena of the Quidditch match was not well-done (though the Quidditch players themselves were great). The troll was terrible - Shrek-style animation in a live-action movie? Bad move. It's kinda strange - it looks as if part of the was done by a team that didn't have anywhere near as much experience as stuff done in the rest of the movie. Makes me wonder...
1) Keep writing good books
2) Get word out about good books from the past. I am still into the works of Alexandre Dumas, Robert Lousi Stevenson, Jack London, and Mark Twain, not to mention Issaac Azimov, Robert Heinlein, uh,oh, better stop now.
Good movies of Good books in some way help. My introduction to a life long relationship with the works of JRR Tolkien begain with the animated version of the Hobbit.
Books that got me into reading:
1) Andrew Henry's Meadow. God I loved that book. way back in kindergarten, too. Has anyone else read it?
2) The Hardy Boy's series. The first "Big Books" I read. (All words, a few scattereted illustrations, and standard novel height as opposed to 10-12" height of little kids books.
3)Alexandre Dumas. All the books ofr the 3 Musketeer Series (20 Years After, the Viscompte de Bragallone[sp?], the Man in the Iron Mask) and The Conte of Monte Cristo (Is that Banderas in the movie posters?) These books, that my grandfather gave to me in Leather Bound Hardbacks from the turn of the Century. They were Huge, something like 500 pages each, and Filled with words I had never read before and couldn't understand in 3rd and fourth grade (Didactic and Dogmatic?) but they dragged me in.
(I am an addicted reader. I've ruined more mornings by reading until the wee hours the night before.)
Make books available to kids, read to them and let them follow along with the words. Encourage their "Reading Habits " by feeding them anything they will consume. Doesn't metter if it starts with Harry Potter and the Fellow ship of the Ring. Yes, they will be Nerds, Sci Fi Geeks, book worms. Yes, they will support the Pulk Paperback industry by buying...Hey, I just realized I am probably describing the target audience of Slashdot.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
Well, the first couple of Harry Potter books are nothing to write home about, relatively speaking. But the third and fourth--those are where really interesting things start to happen.
It seems to me that the books "grow up" along with the reader. The first two are light; they set the stage. But by the time you get to the fourth one, damn. It's like seeing The Empire Strikes Back after watching Star Wars.
I think a lot of people dismiss the books after reading only the first one. But that's really not fair. You don't fully realize what Rowling's doing with her world until you've read more of them. There are all these clever little details in the books, things that you don't notice on first read but that all start to tie together after you've read more of them. The name of a character who becomes very important in book 3 is mentioned once in a very offhand way in chapter 1 of the first book. An incident from chapter 2 of the first book that we--and Harry--shrug off as just another one of those "strange things" that Harry makes happen turns out to be a defining plot point of the second book. You don't see all these things until your second read-through. Then--it's just like magic, or like a visible shape emerging from one of those 3D optical illusions that just look like random blots. You start seeing all these little things that weren't there at all until you knew where to look for them.
As for who they're pitched at...well, the fourth book--which is 700 pages long, a remarkable length for a children's book--begins with a chapter that gave me a serious case of the willies. To this day I can't read that without making sure all the lights are on first--and I'm 28 years old. The rest of the book doesn't pull very many punches, either. Fathers schisming with sons, a named character dying...a soul getting sucked out and devoured...scary stuff.
Don't prejudge. If you're going to knock the Harry Potter books (and that's a general sort of you, not aimed specifically at the fellow I'm replying to), at least read them first. It's not even like you have to go to that much effort to find them; e-texts of all four of them are floating around on Gnutella. I normally don't advocate "piracy," but if there's no other way you're going to read them, I'll make an exception. I think most people will realize they're good enough that they'll want to go right out and buy them immediately afterward anyway.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
At the showing I saw, the whole theater went nuts when the broom hit Ron in the face. It was just such a slapstick surprise, it just *worked*.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca